Quotes About Renaissance

Florence's scribes, scholars, and booksellers were at the forefront of a revolution in knowledge.

This book tells the story of that moment in time. It is a story of high adventure set during the age of exploration—when Francis Drake, Henry Hudson, and Captain John Smith were expanding the boundaries of the world, and Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Galileo, Descartes, Mercator, Vermeer, Harvey, and Bacon were revolutionizing human thought and expression.

If you see a Renaissance body, this is completely ugly in this time. Everybody has to be skinny. But the Renaissance body with incredible flow of the meat everywhere, it was beauty.

Implosion is no invention in the conventional sense, but rather the renaissance of ancient knowledge, lost over the course of time.

Pandora, meet my brothers, Leonardo and Michelangelo. Like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? she couldn't resist asking. Like the Renaissance painters, Leo snapped. He exchanged a snarl with his twin brother. I seriously hate those damned turtles.

History up to the Renaissance had been something that one composed. History after the Renaissance, informed by methods for work and investigation, was increasingly something that one did.

The fact remains that he was less a pope than a Renaissance prince. Homosexual like his predecessor, he was a cultivated and polished patron of the arts, far more magnificent than his father, Lorenzo, had ever dared to be. A

For all its newness, we can understand the Reformation as a Renaissance phenomenon. It is antiquarian in the sense that it returns ad fontes, to the Scriptures and the older church fathers, particularly Augustine, bypassing much, but not all, of medieval scholasticism. It is humanistic in that it is concerned in a fresh way with the individual's relation to God.

By the time of his death, his implicit rejection of many traditional Roman values and a commitment to and admiration for the older culture had imposed a lasting Greek renaissance on the greater part of the empire. To Hadrian, it was the ultimate imperial triumph: a fine and realistic use of the resources of a conquered power and a glorious fusion of two great cultures.

Galileo died in 1642. He was buried in Florence in the Church of Santa Croce, directly opposite the tomb of Michelangelo. This is only right, since together they had remade the Renaissance world in a distinctly Platonist frame.

The Florentines of the generation of 1402, men like Bruni and Alberti, had wanted to use the rediscovery of the ancient Greeks and Romans to change the world. Marsilio Ficino wanted to use it to change the self.

Now in the privacy of your own home, you had the text correct, complete, and whole—pure and uncorrupted, as Renaissance scholars liked to say. The era of having to rely on untrustworthy handwritten manuscripts, or some medieval glossator who spent a lifetime trying to make sense of an often muddled or even counterfeit manuscript of Aristotle, was over.

All this creative outflow—the product of a post-1402 generation of Florentines eager to celebrate their political liberty and its unleashing of human potential—we call the Renaissance. Thanks to the Florentines' reading of Aristotle, a new way of seeing the world had been born, and with it a new appreciation of civic freedom.

Renaissance Florence did not forget about the importance of Christianity and sacred values. It was said that Manetti knew three works by heart: the Ethics of Aristotle, Saint Paul's letters, and Augustine's City of God.17 Still, the Florentines did insist that education needed to reflect the new secular emphasis on human freedom and the pursuit of excellence for its own sake.

The Sistine ceiling contains no direct references to Christianity or Christ. Michelangelo the Platonist didn't feel the need for any, because his message is more universal. Instead all the scenes are from the Old Testament, which every Renaissance Platonist knew to be the ground zero of docta religio, the true religion shared by all peoples and faiths.

Being "civilized" had originally meant living under Roman, or "civil," law; but at the dawn of the Renaissance it had come to denote a way of life and law distinct from that of barbarism. It included prohibitions against murder, incest, and cannibalism; belief in a transcendant creative divinity; respect for property and legal contracts; and essential social institutions such as marriage, friendship, and the family.

Throughout history, cities have been associated with incredible bursts of creative energy - the Renaissance in Florence, or modernism in Paris. London is the cultural metropolis of the early 21st century.

Throughout the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, Latin was the language of learning and international communication. But in the early modern period, it was gradually displaced by French. By the eighteenth century, all the world - or at least all of Europe - aspired to be Parisian.

Despite all the intellectual activity of the time there was in print no guide to the tongue, no linguistic vade mecum, no single book that Shakespeare or Martin Frobisher, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nash, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Izaak Walton, or any of their other learned contemporaries could consult.

It is time to rekindle the spirit of the Renaissancee to achieve a golden age that will be a turning point for human productivity and quality of life.

Given this appalling social climate, the new Library of Alexandria, built at a cost of $230 million in an attempt to revive its fabled ancient predecessor (and resembling nothing so much as a giant satellite dish), has unsurprisingly failed to ignite a renaissance of scholarly acumen.

If Brunelleschie provided the intellect for the creation of Renaissance sculpture, Donatello supplied the heart.

A passionate desire for posthumous glory was a leading motive for men of the Renaissance, whatever their calling.

Undoubtedly I will receive letters asking about the coney's kiss. The truth is that I made it up. There are many Renaissance jokes about coneys, or rabbits. The word was associated with women, particularly with their sexual parts, and young men in plays tend to boast of their coney-catching ways. I've never read a joke about a coney's kiss: One has to hope that that doesn't reflect a lack of imagination of [sic] the part of sixteenth-century men.